The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

ok we all know the story about this house
but do u think its real?
before u answer plz readthis article from the history channel

The events that ocurred on the property of 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, New York, have created controversy for decades. The following is not an attempt to give voice to all opinions on those events, but is rather only a synopsis of part one of the History Channel documentary on the subject. As is the case with all documentaries listed on this site, it does not necessarily represent the views of the webmaster.
Amityville, located on New York's Long Island, is a historically rich community. Annie Oakley made her home there at one point, and even George Washington passed through, "supping" in town on April 21, 1790. However, to the minds of most people, Amityville is famous for one reason: 112 Ocean Avenue, the Amityville Horror house.

The property is rumored to have been the location of a Native American power spot--a burial ground, no less--and is also supposed to have been, at one point, the site of devil worship. While those stories are unsubstantiated, we do know a few things about the property. The infamous house was built in about 1924 for John Moynihan. It was actually the second house in which Moynihan lived on the property. He decision to move the first house off the property was either the result of a history of "trouble" or of a desire to build a larger house for his growing family, according to whomever you listen to.

Several decades later, the DeFeo family moved into the house. They were a religious family; Ronald DeFeo Sr. even surrounded his home--labeled "High Hopes," according to the sign on the lawn--with religious items. DeFeo was also known to spoil his family with gifts and money. However, he also physically abused them, especially Ronnie Jr. and Mrs. DeFeo. The early seventies saw the violence in the home escalating. Ronnie Jr., who some claim was a heavy drug user, ran away from the house several times, but his father brought the troubled youth back each time. He even tried to shoot his father during an argument the older man was having with Dawn, Ronnie Jr.'s younger sister. The gun didn't go off.

Then the night of November 13, 1974 arrives. Ronald Jr. is downstairs, watching Castle Keep, a 1969 war movie starring Burt Lancaster. The real events of that night are obscured in misconception, mystery, and perhaps lies, but we do know that Ronnie at least had a part in murdering each member of his family. He later claimed that a person "with black hands" gave him a high-powered rifle and instructed him to kill his family, whom he "heard" conspiring to do the same to him.

At first, DeFeo claims to the police that it was a mafia hit, but soon thereafter admits his culpability. He is tried and found guilty. DeFeo still inhabits a cell in Green Haven Correctional Facility in Dutchess County, NY, awaiting his biannual parole hearings.

In December 1975, the Lutz family moves into the house in Amityville. Even with a lower pricetag, it is outside their budget, but despite that--and despite the fact that the real estate agent tells them about the mass murder that occurred there a little over a year before--they decide to buy the house.

For more than twenty years, the Lutzes have maintained the following story: over the course of the month they spent in the house, they experienced a terrible haunting. At first, the sourceless noises in the house seemed normal, but they stopped being so after Christmas, as scraping and banging began. Each familymember's personality changed as they each experienced different facets of the horror, creating tension. George Lutz became constantly cold, and as a result, was obsessive about keeping the fireplace going. The sickening smell of old perfume permeated the house, and black stains kept reappearing on plumbing fixtures, no matter how many times they were removed. Flies infested a room that priest "Father Ray"--Father Ralph Pecoraro--reportedly told them not to use as a bedroom. Young Missy starts talking to an imaginary friend, a pig-looking "angel" named Jodie. Calls to Father Ray are disrupted by static. And more--and more--and more. On January 14, 1976, the Lutzes fled the house, claiming to be afraid for their lives.

The Lutz family returned the house to the bank, sold all their belongings (with the exception of a cedar box built by George's grandfather that contained photographs of the children), and moved to California. However, they say that the haunting that began in Amityville did not stop there. It followed them wherever they went, ending years later, only when the exorcist of the Archbishop of Canterbury removed it.

It is a horrifying story, but how much of it is true? Is it the result of some rare, supernatural event that actually happened? A mass hallucination caused by the pressure of living in a house where a mass murder had occurred? Or a hoax, purposefully executed by people looking for money, attention, or both? These questions have interested people for decades, and are the basis of the second part of this series, Amityville: Horror or Hoax.


part 2 of this article
It is true that a terrible mass-murder happened in the house that was once 112 Ocean Avenue. It is also true that Ronald DeFeo, Jr., who is currently serving time in Green Haven prison in NY, had a part in committing the acts. A year later, the Lutz family moved into the house. A month after that, they left, claiming to have been driven out by an evil haunting force. Now, more than twenty-five years after the Lutzes abandoned their house, the Amityville Horror is still hotly debated, seen perhaps to be a perfect example of the debate that has raged over the supernatural for eons.

The Lutzes claim, even to this day, that their house was haunted, but people have questioned their actions during and after that time. In the months after the Lutzes abandoned the house, it was investigated by several authorites on the supernatural. The late Stephen Kaplan, PhD (co-author, with Roxanne Salch Kaplan, of The Amityville Horror Conspiracy) was initially invited to investigate the house, but was later fired. Kaplan claims it was because George Lutz was afraid he would uncover a hoax; Lutz claims he ceased to find Kaplan helpful after finding out he was a "vampirologist." Either way, the Lutzes and Kaplan have called each others' credibility into question ever since. The Lutzes were also introduced to demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, who investigated the house weeks after the Lutzes left it. Lorraine, who claims to be a psychic, felt sadness and depression, and Ed felt an immense pressure and saw floating pinpoints of light in the basement. Ronnie DeFeo's attorney, William Weber, invited parapsychologist Hans Holzer to investigate the house, which he did with deep-trance medium Ethel Johnson Myers. Myers came across the idea that the land was the site of an Indian burial ground, a fact that is in dispute.

The Metro Media news, headed by newscaster Marvin Scott, investigated the house with several psychics. The supposed haunting was quiet that night--one of the psychics they brought with them claimed to fall ill and Scott himself felt a chill on the back of his neck, but, as he notes, it was winter. Not much really happened that night. The creepiest event of the night showed itself in a photograph--seemingly an image of a child with luminous eyes peering out of a bedroom door. Of course, the photograph could just as easily be the result of light shining off a woman's eyeglasses. Scott sums up his visit by saying that seeing the film The Amityville Horror with a pot-smoking audience was a lot scarier than actually spending the night in the house.

The first national article on the Amityville horror story was written by Paul Hoffman and appeared in the April 1977 issue of Good Housekeeping. It was the source of litigation (the Lutzes sued Hoffman and Weber over it), but it opened the floodgates. With the Lutzs' cooperation, Jay Anson wrote The Amityville Horror, a book which the Lutzes have variously said either comes close to the truth or is an exaggeration of events they claim took place. (It is interesting to note that the first paperback edition presents "hundreds" of factual changes from the first hardcover.) The book becomes a national bestseller, eventually selling ten million copies. A film adaptation of the book is released on July 27, 1979, and grosses $80 million.

Ronnie DeFeo's lawyer, William Weber, claims that the Lutzes always wanted to cash in on their owning the house in Amityville. The couple countered by saying that they have never become wealthy; they say that any money they made was spent on reassembling their lives and paying lawyers' fees. In fact, the Lutzes were even sued by Jim and Barbara Cromarty, the people who moved into the house after they left it--the Cromartys said that their lives were made immensely difficult thanks to the tourists and ghost-hunters who invaded their privacy during the two years they lived in the house.

The Amityville Horror was, and is, the source of intense speculation and arguments. Even if one side of the argument was truly wrong, and ever admitted being so, the speculation would still continue. This is a microcosm, albeit a dramatic and emotional one, both of America's search for truth in the information age--and of the world's search for an existence other than the one we know.

I think the people bought a house with that bad history and planned to cash in on it.

It didn't go their own way and now they're regretting it. Their defence of 'but we didn't become rich' doesn't really affect what they hoped would happen.

no the movies wher based on something that accured in real life but in real life people argue wither it was real or a haox

i hope to open peoples eyes to thefact that it isnt just a movie

we all klnow this story so come on people what do u think real or a haox?

errrrr that's what I just said - I think it was a hoax

I think that there are parts of the story that are real, but then again Hollywood put their 2 cents in. So how can we really tell fact from fiction?

aryabout that someone wrote before that they thought it was jsut a movie
and i was writing to that but i guess our dominiers deletedher post and i do see the side of ur answer it could have all been a plan to make money

it is real i have seen it they dont like visiters up there but i have seen it

Amityville Horror was based On a REAL Event. It actually happened. I dunno where it happened Nor have I seevn Amityville either.
~Yours In The Darkness~
V---V

where:the property of 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, New York

this happened in new york some might thinjk in a more rural state butno it was new york

It appears to be a hoax, there are people living in the house and no reports of demonic happenings...

where did u find that information that some one is living there?


another article i found but by abc news
The sprawling house at 112 Ocean Ave. had cost them just $80,000, and they loved it. "It was a dream come true," George Lutz remembers.

True, the house had been the scene of a horrible multiple murder a little over a year before, when 23-year-old Ronnie DeFeo went from room to room methodically shooting his parents and his four brothers and sisters in their beds. But the Lutzes sat down with their three young children and agreed the family could handle it.

Just in case though, the day they moved in they had a priest, Father Ray Pecoraro, bless the house. According to Lutz, the preist said he felt an unseen hand slap him in the sewing room and heard a voice say "Get out." Then, Lutz says, Pecoraro became ill with flu-like symptoms and his hands began to bleed.

The family moved in anyway, but within days they began to notice strange phenomenon.

"There were... odors in the house that came and went," Lutz says. "There were sounds. The front door would slam shut in the middle of the night.... I couldn't get warm in the house for many days.

Lutz says the family kept the fireplace burning day and night in a futile attempt to stay warm, and found strange gelatinous drops on the carpet when they woke up in the morning. At times, he claims, his wife was physically transformed into an old woman, with the face, hair and wrinkles of a 90-year-old.

Lutz claims that he mysteriously awoke at 3:15a.m. almost everyday - around the same time the DeFeo murders were believed to have happened. One night, he says, he heard his children's beds "slamming up and down on the floor" above him but he was unable to do anything because he was immobilized in bed by an unseen force. Later that night, he woke to see his wife levitating and moving across the bed, he says.

The next morning, just 28 days after they moved in, the Lutz family fled the house, leaving their clothes in the closets and food in the refrigerator. If the family had not left, Lutz says, he believes something horrible would have happened. "I try not to think about it," he says.

Psychic Slumber Party

As word spread of the Lutzes' experiences, people interested in the paranormal contacted them. Two months after the Lutzes moved out, reporter Laura Didio assembled a group of psychic researchers to evaluate the family's claims.

The investigators spent a night in the house, walking from room to room trying to pick up ghostly vibrations. "It was like a psychic slumber party," didio remembers.

One of the researchers, Lorraine Warren, remembers an "overwhelming feeling" of "horrible depression" in the house. The team also took a series of time-lapse photos of the upstairs landing. None of the photographs showed anything out of the ordinairy except one, which had what Didio describes as "the face of what appeared to be a little boy, peering out from one of the bedrooms."

Meeting With A Murderers Lawyer

Things returned to normal for the Lutz family after they left the house, and George Lutz began to wonder if it was the house's horrors that had driven DeFeo to kill his family.

"We realized there was something so wrong here that it would be inhuman, it would be improper, to just let him rot in jail and not try to help get him some kind of psychological help," Lutz said.

At his trial, DeFeo had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, claiming he had heard voices and that on the night of the murders, something out of his control had made him kill. The jury rejected that defense and sentenced him to six life terms.

Lutz contacted DeFeo's attorney, William Weber, who was already fielding book proposals from publishers for his client's story. The Lutzes' story of a haunted house had the potential to drive up interest in a book, and Weber agreed to meet George and Kathy Lutz to hear their account.

Weber remembers the Lutzes as starting out in a "reserved" tone, with "no ranting and raving going on." But then, he says, the three went on to consume at least four bottles of wine and the evening turned into a creative writing session about what kind of thing could go into a horror book. "There was this give and take, and toward the end we were creating ideas," he said.

One such idea, according to Weber, was giving the gelatin drops the Lutzes found on the floor a sinister explanation: "If you were talking about the green slime, why couldn't it have come from a demonic source?" he told Primetime.

Weber says he never believed the Lutzes' account of inexplicable happenings during their stay on Ocean Avenue. "Absolutely not. Because they were making a commercial venture," he said.

Lutzes Find Another Project

The Lutzes say they felt pressured by Weber and did not like his idea of offering a share of the profits to DeFeo. They decided not to work with him and, after moving to California, ended up agreeing to a book project with author Jay Anson.

The result, The Amityville Horror: A True Story, released in 1976, went through 13 printings and sold more than six million copies. The film version, released three years later, was a huge box-office success. But the Lutzes never signed a contract with Anson, and the book and the film netted the family only about $300,000, the family says.

Lutz admits some of the scenes in the book and the movie - such as the green slime - were an embellishment. But he insists the book and the movie are based on events that actually happened during the family's 28-day stay in the house.

He denies making anything up, saying that if they had, they would have come up with a better story and would not have fled their house, leaving their belongings behind. But he says people are entitiled to call his story a hoax if that's what they think. "I can;t tell them what to think. I can just say what I experienced."

Medium Says Indian Chief Was On The Warpath

Weber continued to pursue his book project, enlisting Hans Holzer, a professor of paranormal psychology, self-styled ghost catcher, and author of dozens of books on the occult.

In 1977, Holzer visited the Ocean Avenue house with a medium who claimed to be able to talk to the dead. According to Holzer's account, the medium went into a trance and said there was an Indian chief on the warpath in the house because it had been built on the site of a sacred burial ground. Holzer believes Ronnie DeFeo was possessed by the angry spirit of the Indian chief, and that the chief will not leave the house until it burns down and leaves the land bare.

But members of the Montauket tribe of Long Island are skeptical of Holzer's theory, saying there are no records of a burial ground in Amityville. Even if there were, "that doesn;t mean we will go into somebody's body and capture their soul and control in a very negative way ... that's not us," says the tribe's Chief Straight Aroow Cooper.

Joe Nickell, a professional skeptic who has made a career out of challenging claims of paranormal activity, believes there is no scientific basis for any of the claims, from Holzer, the Lutzes or anyones else: "The bottom line is that ... it was a hoax, or is, simply, at best, a matter that's not proven. And that's not very good for America's most famous haunted house."

As for DeFeo, ho told Primetime he lied when he said he heard voices commanding him to kill, and was only trying to create a better insanity plea. He is still serving six like sentences in an upstate New York prison.

So in the end, who is telling the truth? After nearly three decades, there is very little proof either way - though no one who has lived in the house on Ocean Avenue since the Lutzes has reported any strange activity

I believe its a hoax. If it wasn't there would be other people complaining about things in the house.

i think that it was actually a whore but it sux to be trhem cuz theyt didnt realize what was happening lol i would of hated to br thrm x)

Some people think the Lutzes’ story is nothing more than a money-making hoax. They feel the Lutzes simply moved in to a house with a tragic past and took advantage of its notoriety.

Others point out that looking back on the situation in retrospect is the only way this theory of a hoax makes any sense. No one knew the book would spark with the public and become a world-wide bestseller. No one knew the movie would be a hit. And with both the book and film, the Lutzes got only a tiny share of the profits, while Jay Anson and the film producers became millionaires. If this was a hoax, then money would be the goal, and they would have made sure they got the lion’s share of the profits from any book or film venture. That would have been one of the first plans of action.

when i watched the documentary on this house on the history channel they said it was still a vacant house .......i dont think anyone can really say it was a hoax when you dont know cause you wernt there..... somtheing terrified the lutz family enough to jump ship and run....... anything is possible and anything can happen..... i do agre if they were after money they would of sold there story for millions not give that house back to the bank as they did but kept it.......even if they didnt live in it..... but then i dont really think we can say it was a hoax cause we dont know we wernt there and unexplaind things happen all over the world..........but i also think that yeah when they make movies and write books sometimes they do spice things up a bit........

It is and was a hoax...they tore the house down afew years back...the writer of the book said it was all made up...to sale copies.

I believe alot of it happened, but not at "hollywood" levels. As most of us know, hauntings and paranormal activities are real. At least this is my opinion. I also think Ronald DeFeo should never get out. He may be using it as an excuse, but his "use" ( as in drug) is alot of the problem there, that has probably trapped alot of that negative energy there from his killings.

the boy could have been unstable from the abuse and killed his family and blamed it on spirts to get out of trouble

he was possed i had talked to him and he is fine now

I don't know very much about the Amityville story, but I can tell you this much: Having a couple really bad horror movies made about the place doesn't make it's credibility any better.

OK ok, they aren't that bad of movies. I actually did enjoy them, but still...it doesn't help with credibility.

ruby, you have done great research on this! i do believe the claims of the story are true!

ok and here is the other side

http://www.prairieghosts.com/amityville.html

My mother grew up in Amityville. The murder is true, and that is about it. The Lutzes', on many occations, have stated that the book and the movies are a far stretch of what really happend in that house. Did they really tear it down? I could almost swear that it was bought not to long ago. Rember reading about it, and seeing things about in on TV. The new owners reported that nothing strange was happening in the house, but they denied any filming of the inside. Why would new owners of a nice home and piece of land, tear down a house that had nothing wrong with it in their eyes?

From what I've read and seen, there was a tragic event in the house; however, Hollywood embellished as Hollywood will do. Supposedly the house was cleansed.. but the real story, who really knows.

Ruby, great thread hun....I am not sure if I believe the house is posessed or whathave you, but I certainly wouldn't buy it.

I've read the book and seen the movie as well as done some research. I personnally wasn't there so I can't say what was true and what wasn't. I do believe that it is possible that the house could possible have been possessed and the chain of events that took place could have been partly caused by this.

On the other hand, I also agree that Hollywood put their 2 cents in to make a profit.

Like I said, I wasn't there so I can't discredit the chain of events.

Although I cannot refuse the story entirely, I do think that Hollywood has done more to make the truth harder to find in their quest for money.

Well What happen was Ronnie Jr was strung out on drugs and killed his family

The next Family said OMG killing in the house ,Now they hear shit..LOL..so now they are all Freak out.. and move out..
Make a big deal about it an make some cash on it (Only in america)

HOAX

I live in NEW york..I live 5 minutes from the house it's self..let me ask you something can ya find a article on the family that lives in the house now..NO WHY because there IS NOTHING wrong with the house and they don't want to be bothered...When they first moved in they had reporters stalking them I mean come on..they been there for like EVER..Jr hasn't killed anyone yet!! I mean Dad might of buried a few bodys in the backyard but they ain't kiling each other..hehe Just kidding ...Well It is all a HOAX Sorry Had to throw my 2 cents in :p Oh and BTW the house they show Is nothing what it looks like ..

They couldn't afford the house so they planned what they did!

They admitted to it a long long time ago when the story was becoming big but for some reason people didn't pay attention.
Plus there was so much evidence going against what they were saying.
They talked about snow being on the ground but when investigators looked up the weather reports there was absolutely NO snow, falling, or on the ground. That's just one fact. But I'm lazy and it's hard to type while smokig for me hehe.

If you want to know more..i placed a website that explains a it about the possible hoax

Parts of that story is real, but most was embellished as most ghost/horror stories. To see to the public.

long ago this topic was persented...but with far more factual evidence than has been presented here, example...NObody has lived there since the lutz's, written by the same person who earlier said the family who lived there for around 2 years after the lutz's tried to sue them over issues concerning it, someone else claims the house was torn down, but the person who ran the thread last year had CURRENT up to date pictures of the houses current appearance, taken by her, as she lives not far from there...
it was never torn down, it was renovated and the outer shell appearance was altered somewhat...can't recall right now who that was...but i'll see if i can find it

Yes there was a burial ground under the house that went staright to Hell and made people go crazy and kill everyone. And blood run off the walls and black stuff come out of the toilet and I hear voices talking to me saying...gullible fools.
Why focus on the paranormal when the normal will do?
Move on, it was a hoax.